Nouvelle expérience – PhillyCHI design slam

If you’ve never been to a design slam, it can be a pretty intense experience, especially if you sign up to be a design team member. I had no idea what I was in for, but it was worth it.

The rush to create deliverables and a cohesive presentation within a scant 40 minutes is like cramming for a comprehensive exam the night before. But it trains you to think on the fly (which is often what you’ll be doing anyway as a UX designer) and how to collaborate with people you’ve only met a half hour ago. The specific challenge we were faced with made me wish that I had read Nathan Shedroff’s book beforehand – we had to focus on sustainabilty and being “green,” not as a mere trend, but as the focus of the company. Among other ideas my team came up with, we thought of placing recipes on the online site, with links to the ingredients where customers could then place an order and pick up in person.

Alas, we lost. We think it was rigged by that guy in the red shirt…he owns the place where the design slam was held, after all.